What are your plant’s safety goals, and what changes must be made to achieve them?
Shawn Galloway is the CEO of ProAct Safety, a global consultancy firm that works with hundreds of clients across all major industries. He is also a professional speaker and author of several bestselling books on strategy, culture, leadership and employee engagement. Over the course of his career, Shawn has contributed to over 700 podcasts, 200 articles, and 100 videos. Shawn recently spoke with Anna Townshend, managing editor of Plant Services, about some concerning trends he’s seeing in safety cultures and practices.
Listen to Shawn Galloway on Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast
PS: So you mentioned anxiety, stress and mental health concerns among your list of troubling trends that you're seeing, and this is a tough one, in that the consequences are very serious, but it's also a tough topic that may not be easy to approach in a work environment or may not be comfortable for everyone to talk about, especially in a busy high performance factory floor. But the reality is, as you said, suicide rates are up, and mental health has gotten some additional focus, I think at large, post-COVID. So how have you seen manufacturers’ attitudes and practices about mental health change recently? What are some of the positive things that you see companies doing this area, and where is there still work that needs to be done?
SG: So I have this model that I don't want to muddy this conversation with, but I look at 10 focus necessities for organizations. And one, to your point here, I call it, and I'm not the only one, but my term is the complete person, and that's three areas. That's mental health. That's psychological safety, and what I would refer to as corporate nutrition. What are we doing to provide the right education around food, but also providing right food options, and all of that contributes to the individual and their mental health, their physical health, and everything else. So I would argue you need to be looking at all three of those.
But you're right. It's a challenge because most leaders aren't given the skills to be able to create a comfortable environment for people to speak up. I remember a couple of years ago, I was working with a power company, so distribution, transmission of energy, and we were talking about this particular topic. And I do something in some of my workshops to create psychological safety in the beginning, to get people talking about some of these uncomfortable topics, to where it becomes comfortable to do so. And I'll never forget this one individual sharing with me, and he's now a superintendent, long term employee of this organization, and he was saying early on 20 something years ago, when he was on a line crew, his supervisor made the decision to pull him out of the bucket. Think about those line crews. They're working on high voltage power lines up in the bucket trucks, but his supervisor made the decision to pull him out of that because he knew that he was going through a pretty terrible divorce, and he said for three weeks he was really upset. He chose some different words, but he was upset with the supervisor, but later, upon reflection, he realized that supervisor saved his life because he should not have been doing that dangerous task that really needs to keep your head focused and head on a swivel, while he was being distracted by the unfortunate thing that he was going through.
Organizations have to invest in relationships. They, the supervisors, have to invest in relationships to the best of their ability of getting to know their people, about getting to know within reason, what's going on with them outside of work, because sometimes they have to step in and make difficult decisions, like that supervisor did to that individual. But also I was doing some work fairly recently in Australia, and was intrigued to learn in 2019 Australia became the first country, as far as all the research I've done I can tell, that has put mandates in place that companies have to have systems to address psychological safety types of risk. Just like here in the United States, we have to have systems to identify risks. We have to put the controls in place. Check the efficacy of those controls. They look at those psychosocial types of risks, burnout, stress, feeling undervalued, overworked, all of that. And there's a whole list, and there's a great guidance document that you can find from the Australian authority that gives you really good insight into how they're approaching it. But as we've done a lot of work now around psychological safety, we've also learned and worked with companies. Canada now has a standard. It's voluntary, and now so does the UK, and now there's an ISO 45003 standard. So I would encourage people to look to those tools, and because they provide really good insight, the challenge we're going to have around mental health and psychological safety concerns, which is feeling comfortable speaking up about errors, mistakes, when things didn't go as planned, but also creating an environment where people feel comfortable reporting incidents, near misses, and all that which falls under the things didn't go as planned, and more and more organizations are providing scenarios, tabletop drills, case studies, to get people to talk through and build competence and confidence and how to have those types of conversations.
I would encourage people listening to this to look at those standards and see what other organizations are doing about it. But again, the challenge we're going to face in all countries and companies trying to deal with this is it's all perception. Anna, you and I could report to the same immediate supervisor, and just how you and I, individually, separately, were raised, the experiences we had in childhood, the experiences we've had as adults that shape our judgments and decisions and values and everything, we bring that to work, and we bring that into conversations we have with others. And you and I could have the same meeting with the supervisor and walk out of that meeting feeling totally different about how the feedback that supervisor gave us went. One of us could be drastically triggered and really upset. The others was, ‘yeah, that was a little harsh, but I get it, you know, that was what needed to be said,’ and that'll be the challenge going forward. It’s going to have, to some degree, be individual. So it goes back to the relationships and teaching and in educating and holding our leaders accountable for developing and fostering the relationships that help us to the best of our ability, help others get through this, but also have continually improving and robust employee assistance programs and plans.
PS: Yeah, thanks for outlining the challenges there. It's a difficult one, as you said, with perception, and I really like this idea of investing in relationships as a way to meet some of those challenges. So many of the themes that you have seen that you outlined today, they represent some kind of deviation from the norm. As you said, workplace and training shortages, supply chain interruptions and many others are all contributing to a lowering of the standards and practices that have long been established. And then, as you said, those lowered expectations become the norm. So I think it's obvious where the danger lies in that, but it's not always easy to stop when you're faced with those outside challenges always coming at you. So where do you see these affecting manufacturers the most? And how does industry reestablish those high standards, if they've slumped a bit in the last few years?
SG: It is hard, and those things, those outside forces, challenges if you will, are going to continue. One of the sayings I often remember is ‘change is the only thing constant in a lot of organizations.’ Companies have to take the time to think strategically about this. You can't keep firefighting. You can't and you also can't look at decorating the second floor if the bottom floor is on fire. So you have to get to the point to where we can slow down how fast we're going and think strategically about business continuity and about occupational safety. And when we're thinking about strategic thinking here, strategy is its value creation. It's a framework of choices, tradeoffs, or small bets an organization makes to determine how to capture and deliver value. So value comes from making sure we're focusing on the right things and also making sure the things we're focusing on are perceived as important and valuable by others. Because employees are voting with their discretionary time, and leadership votes with their budget, and they're not going to invest in things they don't see value in, and the employees aren't going to give you willing participation, a sense of ownership, if they don't see value in it.
We need to be thinking strategically, and that goes to long term. Who do we want to be in safety? I have conversations with boards and executive teams that may seem trivial with what I'm about to say, but are drastically important. What's our objective in safety? Now, if our objective is to become world class, a highly reliable organization, that requires a massively different allocation of resources, then if our objective is incremental improvement. Both can be noble goals, and the incremental improvement may be what the organization has the capacity for today. They can't invest millions of dollars in it, or sometimes more. That's just not feasible for them at this point in time. So we have to be realistic when we're setting targets here, because if we set these audacious targets or these wildly important goals, these big goals, if you will, then people aren't going to believe in them, if they don't think that they're achievable.
We have to be realistic, and we have to be looking at a time horizon of a few years, at least three years, if not three to five years. We have to be setting a vision of where are we going, and what does success look like when we get there? And the challenge every organization will face, because I've been asking this question for almost two decades now, how do we define success and safety? And if you ask, I'll just pick seven of the top leaders to answer that question, and who's responsible for it. And how do we get there? You'll get distinctly different answers, and if the top of the organization isn't on the same page, it's no wonder we create all of these different subcultures as those individual seven leaders, values and edicts cascade throughout the organization. So if you want to establish high standards, we have to look at that in the context of what does success look like and having adherence to high standards may be one of those priorities.
We have to set a vision that's compelling, but it's also clear to others what it would look like in action. And the vision has to be both results, and it also has to be culture. And culture is beliefs that govern behavior, and it's what's common among an organization. So I've done a lot of work on being prescriptive and specific, what beliefs that became common would be game changing for us, and what behaviors if we observe that were common, which ones would be game changing for us? And high standards may be one of those things, and then, we have to look at, okay, who's responsible for setting those standards and ensuring adherence to those standards, all of those many players, if you will, have to see themselves as actors in that strategy. And strategy tells you where we're going, where we're at against that ideal, and how we're going to address that delta. How are we going to close the gap? And then how are we going to measure our progress toward more of what we want, versus just measuring our progress away from what we don't want? Incidents, injuries, defects, equipment down, all of those types of things. And one of the main reasons organizations don't get what they want in safety is because they're not measuring what they want, they measure all the things they don't want. And we have to set that vision. What does success look like? And then, we have to have a plan that's operationalized throughout leadership, because they're the people leaders in the organization. So if we want to set high standards, we have to get agreement on what does that look like in action? And then we have to increase positive and proactive accountability for those people leaders to ensure we're continuing to go in that right direction.
PS: So setting a vision, I think you've given people a good starting point in thinking about how to do that. And I like the phrase ‘you can't keep firefighting.’ I think our maintenance and reliability folks would really understand that phrase too. It's something they live and breathe every day in terms of maintenance.
